School Boundaries Are Coming Soon! Tell Us How It’s Looking!

Coming soon, school boundaries will be available as Matrix map layers! We’ve listened to your feedback and have been working on providing you, and your clients, with school boundary information.

With the addition of school boundary layers, you’ll be able to see at a glance which school district a property falls into. Simple, interchangeable map layers make it easy to view High School, Middle School and Elementary school boundaries! Even view all three at once if you choose to! School boundary layers in Matrix will be provided through Great Schools.

Here’s an MRISblog.com reader exclusive first-look at the new school boundary layers. Below is an example of high school boundaries in Loudon County, Virginia.

So tell us what you think! How beneficial will this information be to your daily workflow?

38 responses to “School Boundaries Are Coming Soon! Tell Us How It’s Looking!”

Concerned, the school districts change often, will you be able to keep up with this? I just say to call the school board since I can't be sure what school zone a house is located in. If you can keep up with this then it will be great.

The only way school boundary overlays can be TRULY useful is if agents can search by a given boundary area. I am NOT referring to ES, MS, or HS; these fields are often not filled by listing agents. Rather I believe MRIS would have to create 3 new search fields for each listing, something on the order of MAP-ES, MAP-MS, and MAP-HS. Thus when the listing is created in Keystone, the system would look at the PUSHPIN location and autofill values for the three new data fields. And of course, the local school board should always be consulted before writing a contract if schools are important to the buyer.

Too many agents enter "Call School Board" for one reason or another. I think even with the overlays, the ES, MS & HS fields should be mandatory. What it boils down to is who is responsible for verifying the school information? I feel the listing agent should take the few extra moments it may take to verify the ES, MS & HS boundaries. The buyer's agent should not have to look this information up for each and every property. I know, I know, the school boundaries may change or the listing agent feels the school district is not desirable so they don't enter the information. But who are we to decide what schools are desirable? Plenty of consumers search for a certain school district and if "Call School Board" is selected, a possible perfect match will be over looked. How is that good business when representing a seller?

Thank you, much needed. One concern with pulling from Great Schools. Hopefully, the correct schools are listed i.e. city falls into two different counties. Will help with initial search, then we need to confirm with school board.

Fantastic! This is great for searching. The concerns with liability need to be part of the buyer verifying the zone with the school board before making an offer. Excellent addition to the mapping capabiities

This should be a mandatory field as it is so easy to verify online with each locality what the schools are for a given address. Shame on lazy listing agents who don't take the 3 minutes it takes to verify this crucial piece of information.

LONG, long – l o n g overdue but thanks – 'bout time. Now if only you could make it mandatory that agent NOT put Call School Board – every single property in America has a school district assigned to it – bar none. There is simply no excuse for putting CSB in any listing – having been a listing agent for nearly 30 years, I have a link in my Bookmarks that takes me directly to each school board web site and with just a simple input of the address I can get and post the correct schools – and then print off the page and save it in my PDF file as "proof" and verification that the source of the data is from the county or city – CYA – and put the burden where it should be – on the school board. MANDATORY please – and while you are at it, please don't allow agents to put "Use your GPS" for directions – geezzz, what have we become?

Those of us in jurisdictions where the high school boundaries almost never change (because each school district has one high school) have been wishing for this for some time. I agree with the other commentators who suspect "Call School Board" often is a cop-out for agents in a hurry.

I agree that this is a nice feature.
However I think that this and some other enhancements are not needed if the listing agents woudl do their jobs. As Bob stated above a good listing agent would know their area, have links to the schools and be able to put in the schools for their listing. It just takes a few minutes and then this is not needed because the information is there.
It is also going to be a challenge for MRIS to keep in current, because some school districts are rezoning their schools each year as they build new schools.

I think the functionality is a nice enhancement – however, I don't agree with those suggesting that the school fields become mandatory input fields. Further, given the dynamic nature of the zoning information – I would favor removing the input fields altogether, unless they are auto-populated. There is liability associated with providing incorrect information regarding the same.

We REALLY appreciate and value everyone's comments and I promise every post is reviewed by the Product Innovation team and factored into the product design and functionality. Many thanks to all and please keep those "cards and letters" coming on this subject — and others too!

I agree with the others that MRIS should REQUIRE all agents to put in school information and not allow the listing to be posted until it is there. This information is too important for many buyers and we buyer's agents don't have time to check the address for every listing we send to our clients!! There is no excuse. It takes a few seconds to put the address in and it can be rechecked every summer (if you have a listing that is sitting that long!) to make sure boundaries haven't changed.

[…] School Boundaries Are Coming Soon! Tell Us How It’s Looking! Coming soon, school boundaries will be available as Matrix map layers! We’ve listened to your feedback and have been working on providing you, and your… […]

[…] School Boundaries Are Coming Soon! Tell Us How It’s Looking! Coming soon, school boundaries will be available as Matrix map layers! We’ve listened to your feedback and have been working on providing you, and your… […]

[…] School Boundaries Are Coming Soon! Tell Us How It’s Looking! Coming soon, school boundaries will be available as Matrix map layers! We’ve listened to your feedback and have been working on providing you, and your… […]